Expert Roundup: How to get started with drone videography and photography

I don’t know about you but I absolutely adore those nice, smooth and cinematic drone scenes. These gadgets really took filmmaking to a whole new level, especially if we’re talking about amateur filmmaking. But shooting videos or taking photos with a drone can be a challenging task if you are a newbie and don’t really know where to start. I can tell you that from personal experience.

Hi, my name is Cristian and as the founder of Veedyou Media, a company which offers video editing services, I am noticing a significant increase in the amount of raw drone videos we receive for editing. We get drone shots for a variety of different projects, ranging from the fun and snappy travel videos to wedding videos or dead-serious real estate videos.

So I’ve literally zapped through tens if not hundreds of hours of raw drone footage and most of the times the camera movement gives me nausea. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve come across drone shots which look absolutely phenomenal. And that’s great because that makes my job of editing the videos much easier. But most of the times, the shots we get are lacking a little bit.

The height is not optimal, the camera orientation is not right, the angle is not good or the user simply doesn’t know how to properly fly a drone. And at the end of the day, the flying skills can make or break a drone video. Unfortunately, there isn’t really that much you can do in post-production if the raw footage is bad.

So, in an attempt to help everyone out there take better drone shots, I’ve reached out to a bunch of drone experts and asked them one simple question: what are your top tips for a beginner who would like to get started with aerial photography or videography using a drone?